This work presents an intensive, illuminating and fascinating analysis and interpretation of Gabriel Marcel's basic thought on human existence and its ultimate religious meaning. It focuses on Marcel's examination of religious experience as rooted in the human condition, lived by beings who are basically incarnate, in situation, continually en route, beset by tension, contradiction, and ambiguity. It presents Marcel's masterly intuitive-descriptive examination of such real-life religious acts as hope, fidelity and witness. It pays full attention to Marcel's early Metaphysical Journal, truly a basic work, too often neglected in assaying this great, neglected thinker. Marcel, along with Martin Buber, is one of the founders of 20th-century dialogical (I-Thou) philosophy.
Seymour Cain is perhaps the most profound American interpreter of the thought of Gabriel Marcel, and his new book is the fruit of nearly fifty years' reflection on Marcel's great legacy. Its chief merit, I think, is the clarity and eloquence with which it demonstrates that this remarkable French genius offers us the most original phenomenology of religion of the modern period. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
This is necessary reading for anyone concerned with the nature of religious experience. Sterling M. McMurrin, E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Utah
One of the best books ever written about Gabriel Marcel.... With erudition, exacting scholarship and the insights of a ... kindred spirit, Seymour Cain has developed a superbly written and lucid overview of Marcel's thought Katharine Rose Hanley, Professor of Philosophy, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York
